Xenon Starts With 'Z'
by ThePublicSector
Summary: Love, in the aftermath of War. It's crazy.


Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling

Summary: Love, in the aftermath of War. It's crazy.

Xenon Starts with 'Z'

-The Public Sector

You're a crazy bint, I told her once.

Suck it, Malfoy. Just suck it.

-

Yeah, I was a little crazy too, for having defected the way I did. For having just _done _that, the way I did. You'd never believe me if I told you how.

And then you'd never believe me when I told you that all of us—all of us M-ers—all of us were crazy, in our own special little way. And not just because we wanted to be called crazy. We were really and truly crazy. Really.

Mind you, we didn't just _do _our shit for the sake of the 'crazy' label: I really did love free falling from my broomstick, and she really loved taking what she called 'Cornell notes' on the novels she read. She planned to compile them all one day so that people could benefit from her summaries of novels and their major motifs, but really, no one would give that much of a damn to read a synopsis of a book that was longer than the book itself. No one. Or, well, Potter, maybe. Because he's a saint and saints make sacrifices for friends. I guess.

I was slapped (twice) when I told Granger about my penchant for free falling. Something about the idiocy of boys and tendencies to die. Now this was said soon after that blasted War, you know, so the room got really quiet when she ranted on about dying, but hell, she looked cute, gesticulating madly like she was, so I never stopped her.

The War, for us generation M-ers (generation M: M for Mudbloods and Muggles and Mudblood-sympathizers), became a constant bad joke. We ignored it on bad days, when people didn't tell it right, but we smiled a painful smile every time we were confronted with it. Granger tried to forget and move on, but the reality was that, even as she was sounding off on the deaths and the dangers of free falling to the human body (wizard or no), she had realized her mistake the moment it was out of her mouth. But she kept going, you know? She kept going, acting like it was all okay, the way the room was so awkwardly silent and the way everyone's eyes were boring into the back of her head maybe wishing she'd explode because a friend, a lover, a brother, a son had died in that shitty shitty war.

It was a hint, too, to the rest of the world, the way I didn't stop her. And I let her abuse me like that, chastise me for how incredibly selfish I was when I put my neck out there for the sheer pleasure of having my stomach drop half way outside my body only to be jerked unceremoniously back in when I touched down on the ground. I let her tell me that dammit, Malfoy, you shouldn't be so willing to die.

You could hear the gasps from the middle aged and the old. You could feel the fury of the younger ones because it hurt them hardest when all they had ever known that there was honor and fear in dying and fighting Voldemort and suddenly it had been taken away from them to be replaced by less pressing fears of free falling boys.

But they were going to face it. Damned if I ever let the old horrors be shoved aside, and damned too if I ever let the new horrors take second place to them.

There was something Granger said to me years ago, something about living in the moment—in the present—because the past and the future, though they certainly mattered, didn't matter as much. Then she said something random about an emperor and three questions. Well, in any case, it was something very eloquent-like, the way Granger would say it, and not the way some half- assed piss of a boy would try to recount it, so it stuck. And it occurred to me, then, of all times, at that precise moment.

At the time, with a beautiful woman getting splotchy in the face from all her yelling, and bitten-down fingertips prodding my face to accentuate the beautiful woman's points, that was my present. My moment, my right _now_. She feared for my life, and my newly acquired love of freefalling on broomsticks, and I wasn't going to let the hate of the past or the developing fear of the future stop the moment. So she ranted. Everyone else emanated hate and fear in varying degrees. But I couldn't help but love.

So I got down on my knees and asked her to marry me, forgetting completely about the impropriety of a forgotten engagement ring, knowing full well this may have just been the punchline to that very long, very bad joke. She stopped her tirade, sure, but only for a moment—to say "yes," like she was merely pausing to catch her breath—and then she started where she left off, and I'll be damned if I wasn't the happiest bastard in wizarding Britain to hear about how irresponsible a person I was.

And you know, free falling—it isn't so bad. Granger's said so herself. And you know what else? Her meticulously taken notes on Tolstoy and Hesse and such—they weren't so bad either. I really liked how she sifted through some of the—ahem—unimportant shit.


End file.
